The Narratives of Community: Museums and Ethnicity

This book brings together a collection of essays on the revolution taking place in museums around the world as they look anew at the ways communities are represented. It highlights a fundamental shift occurring in 21st century museums: how they confront existing assumptions about people, and the pioneering ways they work with specific groups to narrate oral histories, tell ancestral stories and keep memories from the past alive.

The philosophical thread, woven through each chapter, expresses a rejection of popular claims that minority people are necessarily silent, neglected and ignorant of the processes of representation. This book showcases contemporary museums as spaces of dialogue, collaboration, reclamation and storytelling. It acknowledges the radical efforts many museums and communities make to actively engage with and overthrow existing misconceptions, on the important subject of race and ethnicity.

This book brings together a collection of essays on the revolution taking place in museums around the world as they look anew at the ways communities are represented. It highlights a fundamental shift occurring in 21st century museums: how they confront existing assumptions about people, and the pioneering ways they work with specific groups to narrate oral histories, tell ancestral stories and keep memories from the past alive.

The philosophical thread, woven through each chapter, expresses a rejection of popular claims that minority people are necessarily silent, neglected and ignorant of the processes of representation. This book showcases contemporary museums as spaces of dialogue, collaboration, reclamation and storytelling. It acknowledges the radical efforts many museums and communities make to actively engage with and overthrow existing misconceptions, on the important subject of race and ethnicity.